Seattle TV station KIRO, like a lot of media organizations, has sponsored links on their front page. This is all well and good, since you have to pay for the camera(wo)men and the antennae and the pixels somehow. The problem is that sometimes sad news stories and contextual advertising lead to… hilarity.

@greyer: Actually, I think it’s a different fire. I’ve used the CMS that the site employs, and there’s a way to link a video and a story together so the story headline has the video icon next to it. Because they’re two different headlines, I’m guessing that there were two different fires.

That’s similar to when I worked for an alternative newspaper (think Village Voice). Google ads placed our “adult/escort” ad links on the job posting for our human resources director. Guess that will give you an idea of the work environment.

We had an old 1800’s vintage mill building filled with chickens catch fire near here about 35 years ago (in Manchaug/Sutton, Massachusetts). Everyone gathered to watch the firemen try to put out the fire, and another group of firemen were occupied fulltime by dousing the fires set in the nearby woods by flying {well, more plumetting, actually}, burning chickens who were escaping from the building once the windows had exploded or burned through.

The stench afterwards was horrible, you could smell it for about a five mile radius. No KFC jokes there for sure.